Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Big heads – that is, bigger than lifesize
heads – loom large in childhood. Whether we grew up with Humpty-Dumpty, Mickey
Mouse, the Mr Men characters or Peppa Pig, their big heads and small bodies offer the
very young an alternative image of the human or anthropomorphic form – and it’s
one that has nothing to do with big-headedness. ‘Don’t worry about bodies’,
these big heads tell little children, ‘faces say it all.’

Big heads have featured in art, of course,
across the ages. I find them sometimes friendly, sometimes disturbing. I
suppose the inscrutable Sphinx has one of the most famous outsize faces ever
carved, and one would have liked to know what Shelley‘s Ozymandias looked like.
According to the poem, only ‘Two vast
and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert’; nevertheless,

Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a
shattered visage lies ...

and although the head is shattered, enough remains
for the traveller to discern the ‘frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold
command’. Rather like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, the expression – though not the
face itself – survives.

In late March this year, in Paris, I sat in a
small park named in honour of Georges
Brassens, who had lived in nearby Impasse Florimont, originally his
hiding place from the Nazis (he had managed to abscond from a forced labour
camp). Brassens is revered in France today as one of the best-loved poets and
song-writers of the post-war era. Schools, theatres, public spaces, even a
metro station are named after him. Hence the parc
Georges Brassens in the 15th Arrondissement where, in a quiet
corner and silhouetted against the newly-green branches, I discovered a fine
sculpture of him– a big bronze head of Brassens.

Although the neck has the hint of a collar,
I think one would need more of the shoulders to call this a bust. But it needs
no apology for being just a head. It is wonderful: the humane portrait of a man
who was a gentle anarchist, a chanteur
in the tradition of Charles
Trenet, and a wryly affectionate observer of human folly – his own as much
as other people’s. Look at his high
receding forehead and that slightly puzzled expression, accentuated by the wrinkle
looping upwards from the bridge of his nose; eyes that seem to look inward
rather than downward; a moustache, almost (but not quite) comically large, and a
firm but unassertive chin. How well the sculptor, André Greck, understood this most interesting and interested of men! Julian
Barnes has described Brassens as France’s greatest and wisest singer: ‘We
should visit him,’ he says, ‘in whatever way we can.’ I’m glad to have done
just that.

Three weeks after my encounter with Georges
Brassens, I came face to face with a very different

head: this one, by Elizabeth Frink, sits outside
the Exchange Arts Centre at Sturminster Newton in Dorset. Frink, who had lived
in Dorset for much of her later life, has always been important to me: I count
her and Jacob Epstein as the two artists who first introduced me to the
possibilities of modern sculpture. In 1962, I gazed and gazed but little
thought how much Epstein’s ‘St Michael defeating the Devil’ outside, and Frink’s lectern
eagle inside, Basil Spence’s newly consecrated Coventry cathedral would
still mean to me more than fifty years later. That they meant something to me
even then I am certain: before visiting the Cathedral, I had already spent
hours trying to draw these sculptures from photographs in the then
just-launched Sunday
Times Colour Supplement.

Frink’s Sturminster sculpture is entitled
‘Desert Head IV’. It was given to the town in 2008. In every respect it is the
antithesis of the Brassens head - except that it, too, compels our gaze. The
shoulders, the neck, the chin, the mouth, nose, ear and eye: all assert their
right to be taken seriously. But whereas the head of Brassens is crowned by a
wave of hair sweeping back from the temples, Frink’s is without hair: this head
allows nothing to distract us from its monumentality. It leads with its chin;
its expression is unnerving . Whereas Brassens looks inward, this Desert Head
stares – almost glares – out into the distance. The eyebrow like an escarpment
separating the cranium from the cheek, the slightly aquiline nose, the mouth
that seems to wrap itself around from one side of the head to the other – these
features together assemble a face that might have been painted by Picasso. Indeed,
if you ignore the lantern jaw, this head could almost be Picasso’s own.

Then in Dusseldorf last month I came across
an even bigger, more unsettling head, one belonging to a war memorial by the
German artist Jupp Rübsam (1898-1978). This
memorial, to the members of the 39th Fusilier Regiment, was erected
in 1928 but stood for only five years before being dismantled and effectively
demolished by the nascent National Socialists, who then built one of their own.
Even in its
original form, it must have been a disturbing presence: the helmeted head
is huge, and thick-lipped. Unnervingly un-Aryan to the Nazis, perhaps. And now?
Well the expression is hard to read: from beneath the rim of the helmet, the
soldier’s eyes stare out, giving nothing away. This isn’t so much a shattered,
as a frozen, image.

Yet shattered the sculpture most certainly
was. And now only two bits of it remain – if one may call this huge bust a
‘bit’. The head and shoulders rest on a concrete block which itself stands on an
oblong brick plinth. Placed beside the head is a rescued section of what was
once presumably a body: But whose body, and which section? Were you to imagine
the soldier’s huge head on top of what looks like a section of rump and thigh,
you’d have another (and thoroughly bizarre) kind of sphinx. It makes no sense,
but this is perhaps its point. This big head was retrieved and re-erected in
its present location in 1978 as a memorial ‘Gegen
Terror und Intoleranz’. Upon which
subject, in its present disembodied form, it speaks eloquently – though its
lips never move.

Sunday, 8 June 2014

By rights, I should have been a younger
brother. My mother was a wartime bride, married in July 1941 at the age of 19.
She and my father (who was twelve years older) spent their honeymoon in
Somerset, well away from the bombs that had been falling on south London, my
mother’s home up to that time. Soon after, she was pregnant; but before the end
of the year she had lost the baby and undergone surgery. It was to be eight
years and two more operations later, before I was born. I only remember my
mother speaking of this once, but she knew the child she had lost was a boy so,
in the days long before scans, this must have been a late miscarriage or an
early stillbirth. With the reticence of her time and class, she revealed few
details, and never spoke of how she must have felt, then or in the years that
followed.

Until very recently I have hardly ever
thought about this child who could have been my brother – or, indeed, about miscarriage
and stillbirth, which are about as close as we still come to taboo subjects these
days. They are rarely written about in fiction, where one is more likely to read of
abortion than of miscarriage. I think the only novel I have read in which
miscarriage plays a significant part is D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and perhaps this contributed to the decision to ban
the novel when it was published in 1915.

At the end of the story, Ursula Brangwen, having
broken off her difficult engagement to a young army officer, Anton Skrebensky,
finds she is pregnant and writes, offering to marry him after all.But she doesn’t know that he has already left
England; nor does she know that he, on the rebound and out of anger at the way
she has treated him, has married his Colonel’s daughter, sailing with her to
join his regiment in India. Walking alone across fields near her Nottingham
home, trying to make sense of her life, Ursula encounters some horses in a
field. The animals start to pursue her and she only escapes by running to the
edge of the field and scrambling desperately up a tree, then falling back to
earth on the far side of a hedge. She is ill and delirious for a fortnight,
wrestling with the reality and the implications of being with child:

The child was
like a bond round her brain, tightened on her brain. It bound her to
Skrebensky.But why, why did it bind her
to Skrebensky? Could she not have a child of herself? Was not the child her own
affair? What had it to do with him? Why must she be bound?

Gradually her delirium and despair give way
to a deep sleep during which she sloughs off the old world to which her family,
the mining town in which she lives, and Skrebensky himself had belonged. When
she recovers, she has lost the child but gained a vision of a new life to come.
The irony is heavy – some would say typically heavy-handed – but it prepares us
for the climactic, eponymous, utterly-Lawrentian symbol of the novel:

And the rainbow
stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and
separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the
rainbow was arched in their blood, and would quiver to life in their spirit ….
She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle
corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living
fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

In Madingley Church, near Cambridge, there
is a touching and unusual memorial to a child who had been born and who died on
a single day. It carries a verse epitaph in Latin, penned by the child’s father
in 1636. 300 years later this threnody was translated by the poet Frances
Cornford:

Bring roses, singing girls, soft pansies
strew

To decorate these little ashes new;

Nor with one cry or longing tears invade

The sleeping stillness of an infant maid,

Who in one showery day was here and gone,

To God’s invariable peace passed on.

He whispered to her soul; without a stain

She, to His goodness, gave it back again.

The
alabaster memorial depicts a tiny child, snugly wrapped from head to toe in a
blanket, asleep and

lying on a pillow, facing the onlooker. Above and on either
side two angels hold a Crown of Innocence over her head. I have always found
this tribute to a child so briefly alive as not even to be named one of the
most moving examples of parents’ determination to memorialize a victim of what
is nowadays known as neo-natal death. Within ten years of this baby’s death,
however, the memorial had been smashed by Puritan iconoclasts who chopped off
the angels’ heads and prised the memorial off the wall, breaking it in two. But
the family recovered the shattered fragments and sometime later – presumably after the Restoration – paid to have the memorial repaired and
replaced in the church. It’s an extraordinary emblem of the enduring
significance of a life that hardly even began.

These
reflections are prompted by a recent death in our family. It happened the day
before the mother was due to have a twenty-week scan that would have revealed
the sex of the child whose parents had up to then only called it affectionately
‘Little Bean’. As now we all call him. You can read his story, and how his
parents are planning to memorialize him, here.I hope you will; if you do, you’ll see some
of the messages friends and strangers have posted – none more apt and
affectionate than this, from Winnie the
Pooh:

“Sometimes,” said Pooh, “the smallest things
take up the most room in your heart.”

Adrian
Barlow

Postscript: Little Bean’s parents have now completed their charity fund-raising cycle challenge, riding from Trafalgar Square to the Eiffel Tower in 25 hours. You can read about their achievement here.

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk